I have long written about the importance of dedicated, durable product teams and that we should always strive to optimize for the team and not for the individual function (e.g. product management, user experience design, engineering, test automation, data science, etc.). It’s not hard to spot when teams have not embraced this model, as you see lots of organizational silos and “walls” between members of the team.

In earlier articles I have discussed the key roles in the product organization – product managers, project managers, interaction designers, visual designers, usability engineers, prototypers, engineers, architects, QA and product marketing – and I’ve also discussed the ratios between the roles, but many organizations also struggle with the organizational structure that contains these people.

Product management is all about choices. Making decisions about what opportunities are worth chasing, which problems are worth solving, what features will provide the most value, what the best time-to-market trade-offs are, and which customers are most important. While you’ll never make all the right choices, you have to make most of them right for your product to succeed.

I do not believe great products happen by accident. In every case, behind every great product I find that there are certain truths. Today I want to share ten such truths. I try to keep these in mind on every product effort:

The last note discussed the different types of user interface design – interaction design and visual design – and tried to make the point that both are required for a good user experience. But the response surprised me. So many people wrote to me to complain that their company essentially doesn’t do either type of design, and they know their product suffers for it. Most said that the UI engineers just did whatever they could and that was the design. Sometimes the product managers waded into the design waters and did what they could. Some companies try to outsource some visual design at the end of the process, just before the product goes into QA. Some people that wrote to me said they had no idea what any of these roles were.

I think most would agree that the general state of web site design is still in its infancy, at least as practiced by most companies. While there are some notable exceptions, many sites, even from major players, are often either very difficult to use, downright ugly, or both. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I have formed some theories as to why so many sites are bad, and what it will take to make this a better world as we all spend an increasing amount of our life interacting with the web.